by Dario Solera
Will’s head dangled forward with his chin resting on his chest. From his half-open mouth, blood dripped down onto his clothes in large, dense drops mixed with saliva. His eyes stared downward, stunned and unmoving.
“No,” she said. Her arms moved without her consent, trying to reach her dead friend. A surge of red-hot pain knocked her out once more just as hurried, angry voices came closer.
***
When Sarah woke up, something hard and stiff enveloped her neck. Her back was on what felt like a bed. She sensed the presence of others in the room, and with the limited movements the orthopedic brace allowed, she turned her head a tiny bit. Her muscles were sore and hurt.
Léa was to her right. “Hey,” she said as she heard Sarah moving. “How do you feel?”
She had to clear her throat before it could emit any sound. “Like a wreck. You?”
“Mild concussion. Headache.”
“Where are we?” Flashes of hell ran through her mind. The flight, the brief glimpse on the other side, and then the crash.
“Morges base. Sarah—”
“Will,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry.” She got up from her bed and sat on Sarah’s, holding her hand. Her eyes were sad. “He’s dead.”
“They killed him,” she said between sobs. Tears streamed down her cheeks, wetting the cushion and the synthetic padding of the brace. Every gulp, every sob delivered pain through her neck. It seemed appropriate. She was to blame. It was she who had dragged Will into all that mess. If it weren’t for her, he would be alive at home. “I killed him.”
“No. No, Sarah.” Léa squeezed her hand. “It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
Léa didn’t find words to say. She agreed with her, so there was no point in lying.
Sarah wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her free hand, taking a couple of long breaths and keeping her eyes shut. “Gagnier?”
“He’s fine. They took him away.”
“Where to?”
“A holding cell,” a voice said from the far side of the room. “Given his—and your—propensity for escaping, you will be detained here.” Requin stood near the open door with a stark expression. Unlike the day before, he wore jeans and a hoodie, which made him look almost like any other person. “Dr. Davinson, you will be escorted to and from the labs by my men. You’ll resume working in a couple days.”
Words failed Sarah. She was not prepared to fight him, not in that moment. He should have just gone to hell and left her alone.
“Why were you trying to go to the other side?” He waited for an answer, piercing her with his gaze. “What were you looking for?”
She stared back at him, hatred engulfing her.
“You stole a helicopter and caused the death of a man.”
“We didn’t steal the helicopter. We borrowed it, and Lieutenant Gagnier has a valid license,” intervened Léa.
“And then you flew through an interdicted zone. That’s a criminal offense. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You will do as ordered.” He turned to leave.
“I want to see Will.”
Requin glanced back over his shoulder for a brief moment. “That can be arranged.”
Twenty-three
Her steps reverberated against the tiled surfaces and through the cold air in the base’s morgue. A vast wall of refrigerated cells shined and glistened in the fluorescent light. The brace pressed on Sarah’s chin and neck. She had gotten used to it, and she no longer tried to move her head. Instead, she turned her whole torso in a way that felt awkward and clumsy.
The medic in his white coat pulled open one of the doors in the wall. A mist fell out and spread on the floor, cold on her legs. Inside, two feet were visible. The steel stretcher made a gentle rolling sound as the man slid it out of the cell.
Sarah’s heart beat in her chest with anger, and Léa squeezed her hand as the doctor gently pulled the white sheet off Will’s head.
His neck was torn on the left side, swollen and reddish. His face was pale, verging on a strange hue of blue.
Twenty years of friendship ending in an instant, and it was only her fault. Her mouth crooked and contorted as she failed to fight tears. She hadn’t heard what he had tried to say on the helicopter, when everything had turned from adventurous to terrifying. The army had fired at them without warning—a fact that told a lot about the scale of what was happening—but the problem was not the bullet that had struck Will.
It was Sarah’s egoism, which had dragged him and everyone else on that helicopter. She had convinced them to help her in her hopeless quest to meet her biological parents. Was that worth it? Wasn’t losing a lifelong friend too high a price for the chance to find strangers that might very well be the worst persons in the world?
Tears fell like raindrops on the cold floor.
***
“Dr. Davinson, tell me once again why you tried to trespass to the other dimension,” he said, sitting at the table in front of Sarah. The room was just a box of raw plaster, unheated and dull.
“I haven’t told you.”
“Isn’t what happened enough to turn you into a reasonable person? What else do you need to happen to convince you that there’s nothing to do but do as I tell you?”
“You are playing—”
“God? You wouldn’t be the first to tell me.”
She waited a few seconds before continuing. “No. You are playing with fire—fire you don’t know how to put out.”
“Then tell me how to.”
“You’re turning your problems to mine.”
Requin laughed. “Yes, I admit it, I am particularly good at that.”
Sarah sighed. “I need to go to the other side and take measurements, see if the anomaly there is like ours. I must discover if the particle accelerator was used, and how. Maybe there’s a connection.” She was lying, but her lies were plausible. Hell, it made a lot of sense as she spoke it aloud.
He nodded a few times, staring at her with an impassible expression. “Professor Richards told me the same.”
A lucky ball, for once. “When can I go?”
“Tomorrow. You won’t go alone. A squad of my men will escort you.”
“What for?”
“Your protection, of course. You’re very important to us, and there is war on the other side.”
She hadn’t told them anything about what she had seen there. She wasn’t even sure of what she had witnessed—some kind of battle, but for what? From the certainty in his voice, she suspected that Requin had sent someone to have a look, or perhaps he was just acting as the boaster he was.
“OK,” she said. She would have to find a way to ditch the soldiers, or convince them to let her go by herself.
“Why haven’t you told me about this before?”
Sarah didn’t unlock her eyes from his. “Let’s say I don’t like your manners.”
“Doctor, I am a rational person, you should have learned that by now. Despite that, I am very good at understanding people. People, and their past.”
She raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to continue.
“Your friends from the other side will be held here as a guarantee. If you don’t return, they will die. Understood?”
The stakes were getting higher, but she wasn’t planning on not making it back home. She nodded despite the sense of desperation building up inside her. If her fleeting plan failed, more people would perish. “I will need one week.” She tried to buy time.
“Two days.”
“Three.”
Requin stared at her.
She feared that she was showing too much, letting her emotions through. Biting off more than she could chew. Things were getting out of control, and she had no idea how to proceed. Moreover, she was going to be alone against professional soldiers. She ought to try, and she had the entire night to think of something, but she had to be prepared to not be able to find her parents. Sarah just needed one chance to s
neak away from her escort.
“Agreed. Remember what I said. For real this time.” He stood and left.
***
They had taken Léa to a holding cell that afternoon, so Sarah had returned to the infirmary and found it empty.
The dull light cast long, blurry shadows on the floor and walls. She was brooding over the argument with Requin, trying to block out a faint electrical humming coming from somewhere in the large room. She didn’t feel like sleeping in the wide, open space. Something childish for sure, but being alone there had allowed some uneasiness to form inside her. The clock on the wall clacked another passed minute, reading five to midnight.
Dark, confused thoughts darted through her mind. Will was dead because of her actions. Requin, the slimy bastard, had threatened to kill Léa and Gagnier. Sarah doubted it was a real threat. It was more like a lame attempt at placing a deterrent.
“Is it?” she asked herself.
There was no point in killing them. No purpose. But on the other hand, they were irrelevant to him. They weren’t even from this world; he could make them disappear without a trace, without questions asked.
A cold shiver went through her body.
Things looked so strange, so absurd, that she ought to start weighting them properly. Taking threats into account. Requin was using her friends as leverage to force her to do what he needed her to do, like a puppet master.
It was a hoax, going out there to investigate, but she had to stick to her own fake plans if she wanted to avoid any harm to Léa and Gagnier. Yes, she would think of another way to find her biological parents. Moreover, the world was on the brink of destruction, so who was she to pursue her own personal dreams when she had the chance—had been asked—to fix everything? Who was she to turn her back to the problem she had helped cause?
In her mind, she imagined herself like a heartless, selfish person.
“You have won,” she whispered.
Twenty-four
The jeep in front rocked and jerked on the muddy track that led to the anomaly’s field. Soldiers spoke into the radio every now and then to exchange pointless status updates, and Sarah felt squeezed between the two men at her sides in the backseat of the vehicle. She had never been inside such a car. Outside, green, matte camo paint looked old and faded. The diesel engine sputtered terrible noises, and everything seemed austere, not made for comfort but for durability. Even the seats were stiff, and after only half an hour, her back and legs ached.
Before getting on the jeeps, the eight soldiers had been chatting and joking, leaving Sarah on her own to cope with her thumping heart and clenched guts. She hadn’t listened to their dirty jokes, dismissing them as a macho façade that all soldiers comply to. These, unlike others she had seen guarding the Institute, didn’t look like conscripts, but instead they had the calm attitude of professional soldiers.
Now she glanced at her protectors and wondered if, like her, they sensed uneasiness, or if they were used to it. They wore full battle gear: camo fatigues and helmets, bulletproof jackets, knee and elbow pads, and reinforced gloves. They had given her black fatigues and an unmarked bulletproof jacket, which made her feel not so protected and clumsy at the same time.
Doctors had replaced the rigid orthopedic brace with one made of dense, thick foam, which allowed a little more movement while still preventing her from moving her head all the way. Having her neck locked for two days had proven enough to stiffen her muscles. Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea going to a war theater with a damn neck brace.
“Ten minutes,” Emminger said to the others as he drove the jeep through a large, muddy pool of water. “Road is clear for the next kilometer.”
The car proceeded slower than a normal vehicle would go. Even Sarah had managed a faster pace on her trudge in Frank’s SUV, but military procedures demanded caution even with no danger in sight.
At her sides, the soldiers tightened in their seats as the wide, blackened crater where the alien bomb had hit came into view. She wiped her sweaty hands on her thighs. “Are you worried?” she asked, making sure to be heard.
Emminger glanced at her from the rearview mirror, and she caught a glimpse of the others clenching their jaws.
She needed to discover what they had been told. “Do you know what’s on the other side? What do you expect to find?”
Both jeeps stopped. “Fifty meters,” the radio crackled. “Proceed slowly.”
“Copy that,” the driver answered, pressing the transmission button on the radio strapped on his shoulder. “We’re right behind you.” He looked back once again through the mirror, catching Sarah’s gaze. “I hope this is worth it,” he said with a hint of fury in his eyes. “And yes, we know what to expect.”
Sarah swallowed a lump in her throat. She had seen something alarming, but maybe these men knew more. Perhaps it was worse than she imagined. They sure were worried, and she felt guilty. Was she putting even these men in unnecessary danger?
With a slight roar from the engine, the jeep lurched forward, following the one in front, whose exhaust produced a gust of black smoke.
As if merging into a block of ice, the first vehicle blurred away and then disappeared. This time Sarah had been able to observe the phenomenon with her full focus, and her heart beat fast at the very clear picture of what was about to happen. Sweat formed on her forehead.
The road in front began to blur, and so did the trees, the grass, and the snow-clad fields. Radios sent angry static and then a sharp clacking sound as the jeep ran across the invisible threshold between the two worlds, just as Sarah wondered how it truly worked, where the atoms of her body were as she was midway through the passage. For a split second, she had the strong impression that her thoughts had frozen.
Twenty-five
“I would never have imagined I would end up in a prison cell.”
Gagnier sat in silence on his cell’s cot and stared at the floor on the other side of the wall of steel bars separating his and Léa’s cells. Except for them, the place was empty.
“It’s surprising how life can change in just a few days, completely out of your control.”
“My fault,” he said.
“I could have chosen to stay at the hospital. It rarely is someone else’s to blame. You were doing your job, I was doing mine.”
A soldier came pushing a metal cart. “Breakfast,” he announced.
Léa and Gagnier stood and walked to the front of their cells to fetch the steel trays with the meager meal.
“The coffee smells awful,” she said.
“Try to eat everything.”
“Now you sound like an older brother.”
He snickered and then, after a moment, added, “And you have one?”
“What?”
“An older brother.”
“No. I have an older sister, though.”
“Yes? Where is she?”
“She lives in Lausanne. To tell you the truth, she was worried for me, but now I’m worried for her. If the fight has spread there…”
“I doubt it. Everything revolves around the anomaly.”
They remained silent for a while, eating their breakfast.
“I wonder what Sarah said to convince them to let her go to the other side. I guess she found something credible,” she said. “She will need our help.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Is there a way to get out of here?”
“Probably.”
“Will you try getting us out of here?”
“Maybe later.”
Léa exhaled a long sigh. “You’re not helping.”
“This is a military detention area, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I have. And I also have noticed that this is not Alcatraz.”
Gagnier smiled. “You have good observation abilities. Indeed, this place is made to detain drunk soldiers, not mass murderers.”
“We are neither, by the way.”
“Of course. We are nothing. We don’t exist.” He took a bite
of cereal bar and gulped down some coffee. “We—” A gurgling sound came out of his mouth. His body bent forward as he tried to cough.
She watched him becoming red in his face and holding his throat. “Hey, you OK?”
He fell on his knees. Half-chewed stuff mixed with coffee dripped off his lips.
Léa jumped to the bars dividing the cells. Gagnier was too far away for her to reach. “Help!” she yelled. “We need help here!” She watched him collapsing on the floor on his right side. “Help! We need a doctor!”
Gagnier’s head dropped limp and he closed his eyes, and all she could think of was that she would now be alone in this alien world.
Twenty-six
On the other side, a black wall of dancing fumes obstructed the view. Snow-topped mountains were barely visible at the edges of the smoke, and an acrid smell of burned plastic hit Sarah’s nostrils.
“Keep your eyes open,” Emminger said, and then he talked into the radio. “We made it through. Status?”
No one answered. The men looked outside with wide eyes as the jeep stopped. “We’re an easy target here,” the passenger said—Dubois, if Sarah recalled it right.
A gust of breeze cleared some of the smoke.
“Oh, fuck!” he exclaimed. “That’s the other jeep.” He pointed at the smoking wreck in front of them.
“Get off!” the driver yelled. “Doctor, you stick to my ass, is that clear?”
Sarah nodded, but the man was already outside and pulling open the car’s door. Grabbing her jacket, Emminger yanked her out of the car and shouted something to the others. The urgency of the situation emptied her mind.
The four men formed a tight pack with Sarah in the middle, squeezing her between their backpacks. She felt transported, pushed forward against her will by a strong, unstoppable current. They moved quickly toward a group of bushes and knelt down there.
“Keep your head low.” He pressed the transmit button. “Squad one, do you copy?”
Static came through the radio.
